The Great Adventure:
NAVIGATING THE FLOOD
Genesis 7:1-7, 8:6-11
Noah shows us how to deal
with the turbulence of life.
A sermon preached by
Rev. William O. (Bud) Reeves
First United Methodist Church
Fort Smith, Arkansas
May 29, 2016
Make no mistake about it. Floods are scary business. One of
the most tragic floods that I have been involved in happened
almost six years ago at the Albert Pike campground in southwest
Arkansas. Albert Pike is a rustic campground in the Ouachita
National Forest, and I camped there many times as a child and
later with my kids. It’s a beautiful location on the Little Missouri
River, which at that point is a gurgling stream that you can wade
across.
But in the wee hours of the morning on June 11, 2010, there
was a tremendous thunderstorm just west of Albert Pike,
dumping several inches of rain on the area. The flash flood came
barreling down the valley, and around 5:30 in the morning, the
river rose about 20 feet in a matter of minutes, catching campers
asleep or unprepared. The raging flood destroyed tents and
trailers and even ripped up the pavement on the road. Twenty
people, including eight children, were killed. One of the children
was the granddaughter of a friend of mine who was a church
member in Hot Springs. Words cannot describe the devastation
that family experienced for months and years after the flood.
Floods are scary business, no matter what form they take.
They are not always natural disasters, but sometimes more
personal in nature: a family member has a terminal illness, a
marriage ends, a child gets in trouble with the law. These
personal and private tragedies are the common experience of all
of us. Sometimes we feel like the bridge over the troubled waters
of our lives has been washed out. It’s like the flood of events has
swept us away. It’s more than we can handle on our own, and we
need help. Does God have a word for us today?
Things didn’t work out too well for God in the beginning,
either. His ultimate creation, the human being, proved to be a
flawed model. They were constantly turning away from God and
engaging in all sorts of deviant behavior. So finally God just got
sick of it and decided to start all over. He’d done pretty well with
the animals, so he picked one man, Noah, and his family to
gather all the animals together and preserve them while he
destroyed the rest of humankind. (Don’t get all tied up in knots
trying to analyze the character of God in some of these Old
Testament stories; just go with the flow, or in this case, the
flood.)
God called Noah and gave him the design for a huge boat to
carry all the animals. Noah built it, and he and his family herded
every kind of living creature into the ark. Then the heavens
opened up, and it rained for forty days and nights. The whole
earth was covered with water. Every person and every animal
that was not on the ark drowned. (I guess the fish were fine.)
When the rain finally stopped, Noah began sending out doves
to determine if the floodwaters had receded. On the third
attempt, the dove did not return to the ark, and Noah knew it was
safe to disembark. Genesis 8 indicates that they were on the ark a
little over ten months with every animal in the world. When they
came off the boat onto dry land, the first thing Noah did was to
build an altar and thank God! Do you blame him? Then God
gave Noah the sign of the rainbow, a sign of hope that God would
never again destroy the earth by a flood. Noah could look into
the sky and see the rainbow and know that God was keeping his
promises.
Noah and the Flood is one of the classic stories of our faith.
Often it has been made cute and sweet for the children, but it is
actually quite a disturbing story. My grandmother had a Bible
storybook when I was a kid that had a picture of the Flood by the
19th-century artist Gustave Doré.1 It showed dozens of people
clawing and clambering onto the last point of land, trying to
escape drowning in the flood. As a kid, it was a scary picture. It
scared Dane and Sara when I showed it to them this week.
This story portrays a very complicated picture of God. In his
grief over the sinfulness of humanity, he destroys his whole
creation. Not out of anger, but out of sorrow. Yet there is grace
and providence for Noah and his family and the animal kingdom.
And at the end there is a new covenant. God has a change of
heart and reboots the human experiment. It’s complicated, but I
also believe it is an instructive story for our discipleship. Today
let’s learn three life lessons from Noah that will help us deal with
the complicated, scary, and even tragic times in our own lives.
First, play to an audience of one. Live your life to please
one person—and it’s not yourself. Adopt as your priority the will
of God for your life, and you will endure and thrive through any
troubled times you face. It’s not about your spouse; it’s not about
your kids; it’s not about your boss; it’s only God who can give
you the power to survive the flood.
Noah and his family were able to survive the flood because
they alone among all the people of the world had remained
faithful to God. The Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you
and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are
righteous before me in this generation.”2
Can you imagine the ridicule and criticism Noah had to
endure while he was building the ark? Especially when he told
people why he was building it—that God was tired of their sin
and was going to send a flood and destroy them all. If there had
been homes for the insane back then, Noah would probably have
been committed. Nevertheless, he just kept working, getting
ready for the day, following the call of God, and being faithful.
Do you think that gives us any clue on how to live?
At age 26, Ken Elzinga joined the economics faculty of the
University of Virginia. A tenured colleague warned him that
being explicit about his faith would hinder his career. So
Professor Elzinga was stunned to see a flier with his face on it
placed at a prominent campus location. A campus ministry had
posted it to advertise a talk he had agreed to give.
At this point, Elzinga was a relatively new believer. He
worried, would fellow professors think less of him? Might this
harm his tenure chances? In his deep anxiety, he returned to
campus late that night and secretly took the poster down. But
after hours of soul-searching, he concluded that his life was not
about career ambition but about faithful discipleship, and that
being private about his faith was not an option. So the next
morning, Elzinga put the poster back up.
In the four decades since, Elzinga has been named professor
of the year multiple times and is still a speaker in high demand.
Serving only one master has proven to be liberating. Why?
Because pleasing an audience of one makes us less anxious, less
sensitive to criticism, and more courageous. Playing to an
audience of one makes us more secure, less captive to our own
ego, and less concerned about how others see us.3
Second lesson from Noah: Build your ark before the rain
starts. Once the floodgates open, it is too late. Prepare for the
storms while the sun is shining, so you’ll be protected when
everything breaks loose. I’m sure Noah looked silly building a
boat on dry land when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. But he
built on faith, and when the thunder rumbled and the lightning
flashed, he was ready. We need to build the foundation of our
faith like that and be ready before tragedy strikes.
All my life I have known people who had storm cellars in
their yards. In South Arkansas where I grew up, we called them
“fraidy-holes.” I always thought that was the silliest thing until
March 1, 1997, the day I stood in my driveway in Bryant,
Arkansas, and watched a funnel cloud go over my neighborhood
and dip down to cut a mile-wide swath of destruction and take the
lives of 12 people, including 2 of my church members. Suddenly
I could see the value in a shelter! If that tornado had dipped a
few minutes sooner, I would have been as defenseless as
anybody.
I still don’t have a storm shelter, but at least I don’t go outside
any more when the tornado sirens go off. I get in a safe place.
I have an extended family member right now who is battling
the last stages of aggressive melanoma. It metastasized in her
brain, and during a surgery last week, she had a massive brain
bleed. She is now in hospice care, and they don’t expect her to
live more than a few days. She will leave behind a husband and
two teenage children. Unfortunately, the medical tragedy has
been compounded by the emotional and spiritual dysfunction in
the family. It has just been tough. I was talking with my brother
this week, and he said, “It’s a classic case of trying to cope with
tragedy without a spiritual foundation.”
When your life is threatened by a personal tragedy, it’s too
late to try to build a spiritual foundation for strength. That
already has to be in place. It just breaks my heart to see families
go through an intense time of suffering and not have the
resources spiritually or emotionally to deal with it. I mean, the
blows of life knock the wind out of strong Christians sometimes.
But without the strength of faith, a tragedy can knock your props
out completely and send you falling into the abyss—unless you
have a lifeline to God.
If we make a habit of walking with God, if we have the
spiritual foundation, then we can make the claim Paul made: “We
are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not
driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but
not destroyed.”4 Build your ark of faith before the rain starts;
then when the floods come, you can float on top.
Lesson three: When the storm is past, send out the dove.
Don’t let the floods of life embitter your spirit. Don’t let the
storms turn you away from God.
After forty days and nights of rain, Noah was waiting for the
floodwaters to recede, and three times he sent doves out to see if
they could find a perch. The first time the dove just returned to
the ark. The second time the dove brought back an olive leaf—a
sign of hope. Then the third time, the dove did not return; it had
found a home on the dry land.
The dove is a sign of hope, a sign of peace, a sign of the
Spirit. After a storm in our life is past, we need to send out the
dove. In other words, reach out to find hope and peace in spite of
our difficulties. It’s too easy, when life has knocked you for a
loop, to stay angry and bitter about the whole experience and
wallow in self-pity and ask over and over again, “Why me,
Lord?” You can stay angry at a person who has hurt you, or at a
situation that has forced you into a bind, or at God who failed to
protect you from trouble. Or you can send out the dove of peace
to that person and seek reconciliation. You can send out the dove
of hope and let the past be past and look to the future. Or you
can draw near to God and rely on him for strength and healing in
the aftermath of your trouble. When the storms of life deposit the
debris of anger, grief, hostility, resentment, and self-pity, let go
of it. Send out the dove, and look for a new day.
Dr. Robert Smith, a pastor and seminary professor, will never
forget the date of October 30th. It was the day his son Tony was
working at his restaurant. Four young men got into the store and
tried to break into the safe and the cash register without success.
Then they held Tony at gunpoint, and when he couldn’t get the
register open, three of the robbers fled. But the last one stood on
top of the counter and fired one shot into Tony’s body. Thirtyfour years of life ended suddenly.
After the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of his son’s
murderer, the Lord laid it on Dr. Smith’s heart to write the young
man. He was only 17 when he murdered Tony. God had been
working on this father’s heart, so he wrote to express his
forgiveness. He didn’t hear back for two years, but then he got
this letter:
Dear Mr. Smith, let me say that I am truly sorry for your
loss. I really am. Also, I hope that this is really you that I am
writing because I have received a lot of threat mail from your
family members and friends. So that's why I never wrote
back. But today I thought that I should give it a try because I
really wanted to talk to you. I've been locked up three years
now and the worst three years of my life. I don't think that I'll
make it much longer though. You know, I grew up in church
my whole life. I just hung with the wrong crowd on that
night. I'm sorry. …I hope to hear from you very, very soon.
Thank you for forgiving me. Can you keep praying for me
too? This is getting too hard for me to bear, and sometimes I
feel just like giving up on life.
Robert Smith got that letter, and he began to think about how
God had forgiven him. God’s forgiveness is unconditional, and
he understood that if he ever wanted to get beyond his grief, he
would have to unconditionally forgive. And that unconditional
forgiveness was impossible without God. So Smith wrote the
young man back and asked to be on his visitation list. He said, “I
want to go up to tell him about Jesus. I want to let him know that
I love him. I want this young man and my son to hug together in
heaven one day. Because forgiveness is not difficult, forgiveness
is impossible… without God.”5 After the storm, send out the
dove.
If you live in this fallen, broken world, at some point you will
encounter a flood. You’re gonna get wet! Just get ready. Play to
an audience of One. Build your ark before the rain starts. When
the storm is past, send out the dove. That will be your peace and
strength. That will be your bridge over troubled water. That will
be your high ground in the flood. That will be your rainbow in
the clouds. That will be your great adventure. Amen!
1
Gustave Doré, Flood Destroying
The World.
2
Genesis 7:1.
3
Alec Hill, "The Most Troubling Parable," Christianity Today (July/August
2014).
4
II Corinthians 4:8-9.
5
Dr. Robert Smith, Sermon "Rated R for Redemption,” PreachingToday.com